I also think full skips call less attention to a kid than subjects acceleration - which can be a pro or a con depending on the kid. Of course some kids need both full and subject skips...
Due to some indiscretion on the part of my MIL, DD was aware that she'd be allowed to test for a potential skip during the last few days of her 1st grade year. And a 6yo has no discretion for exciting news, so all of her friends heard about it - and they reacted very negatively, saying that skipping was "cheating" and "not fair." I think that a subject acceleration that kept her with those same kids would be a worse social position than a skip that put her with entirely different kids. (Which is consistent with what I've heard anecdotally, that the left-behind kids are a much bigger problem than the higher-grade kids.)
Gradeskips may be rare in your district, but they are much much less rare than our district (1/3 years!)
For a similar district size? I wasn't surprised by the absolute numbers, so much as the infinitesimal portion of the student body. I got the impression last year that full-grade skips are quite rare (particularly as you go up in grades) but that subject acceleration in the older grades wasn't nearly as rare.
The other kids testing were two middle-school aged boys (who I believe were testing for individual subjects, not an entire grade), and a high-school aged girl who had "more tests than anyone else." I wonder if she was a homeschooler (or partial homeschooler) who was testing in order to get formal credit for the work she'd done - the testing isn't just to get a grade skip, but to get transcript credit for work not done through normal district-offered classes. For instance, if DD later did Algebra I as a summer program through Duke TIP, she'd have to test through the district both to get transcript credit towards graduation and to be allowed to enroll in Algebra II.
